Review Essay: Health Care on the Maine Frontier
David R. Jones reviews "Diseases in the District of Maine" and "A Midwife's Tale"
Goose Eye No. 2 (2022)
Review Essay
Health Care on the Maine Frontier
David R. Jones
Health Care on the Maine Frontier
Diseases in the District of Maine, 1772-1820: The Unpublished Work of Jeremiah Barker, a Rural Physician in New England. By Richard J. Kahn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 568. Cloth $35.00.)
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Pp. 444.)
Birth, sickness, and death were fundamental aspects of life in early Bethel. So health care mattered! But we know awkwardly little about it. The same applies generally to the Northern New England frontier.
Moses Mason and Molly Ockett are early Bethel’s best known characters. Both were medical practitioners. Yet we know very little about their work.1 Histories of Maine and Northern New England only take up medical/health history in the second half of the 19th century. That’s not surprising. There’s little previous evidence: no effective licensure, registration, or required education even for doctors, much less midwives and healers; nursing was mostly women’s business. As medical schools and hospitals, first established in Boston, moved to Maine there was no immediate effect on the countryside. Advancing surgical techniques, new if not necessarily efficacious drug regimes, and the prominence of medicine, nursing, and public health in the Civil War provided evidence for historians.